Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

[SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!]

An optimistic, superstitious robot makes a charming (if unreliable) narrator. Klara is purchased to be a companion to Josie, who is 14 and crippled by complications from an elective genetic enhancement surgery. Josie’s sister is already dead from a similar surgery. Her mother has commissioned a “portrait” of Josie from Mr. Capaldi, but we learn that this portrait is really a kind of skin that an AF – an Artificial Friend, like Klara – can wear. Klara is able to impersonate Josie very well, and this is the mother’s plan in case Josie dies.

Capaldi believes that an AF can essential become Josie – that there is nothing to Josie that cannot be replicated if she is observed carefully enough. So he is what you might call a “hard materialist,” who thinks that we are nothing but molecules following the laws of physics. This comes back at the end of the book, in a scene that I think is meant to cap the whole book, but which falls flat to me. Klara is slowly fading out in a scrapyard, years in the future, when her old store manager appears and they have a conversation. Klara explains:

Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.

I think this robot watched too many Disney movies. Capaldi is wrong, but this isn’t the reason. If what makes Josie special is how others feel about her, then Capaldi is right. Just get an AF to immitate her perfectly, and those feelings can continue.

But I liked the book a lot, in spite of it missing the point in the denoumont. Having a robot narrator who doesn’t always understand what’s happening means you get clues through her observations that you have to piece together. People don’t usually explain situations to her.

For example, Josie has an “interaction meeting” where a bunch of kids and their moms come over and have to socialize. (I read explanations online that this was due to all education being remote; I didn’t get that from the book, but it makes sense.) Josie invites her closest friend, Rick, their neighbor. Klara describes how Rick enters the gathering, and everyone stops talking – there is clearly something about him that is obvious to everyone, but it’s not obvious to her, so she only relates her observations. At first I thought of race – maybe Rick is black (or something), and the moms are all racist, but Klara doesn’t know to even note his skin color. That’s not it, though. Eventually, you learn that all these other kids have had the genetic editing surgery (they have been “lifted”), and Rick hasn’t. I still don’t know why that’s so obvious when he walks in a room (do “lifted” kids have a big L on their forehead? I guess they didn’t grow up listening to “All Star”), but it’s not important.

Other plot points to remember:

Clara thinks the sun goes into a nearby barn at the end of the day. She goes there and prays to the sun to “send his special nourishment” to heal Josie. Her vision and memory seems messed up while this is happening (e.g., she sees a certain shelf from the store that sold her, as if it is now in the barn), and she interprets memories that come to mind as messages from the sun. She promises to destroy a pollution-generating machine she calls the Cootings Machine.

When in the city for Josie to see Capaldi, she gets a chance to destroy the machine with Josie’s father. He takes a special chemical, P-E-G Nine, from her own head and pours it into the machine to break it.

Rick and his mom meet the mom’s old flame, Vance, and try to get him to help Rick get into college. Most colleges only take lifted kids now. Vance is impressed with Rick but hurt by years of being ignored by the mom, and he eventually storms out.

Klara is always watching for the sun’s special nourishment. Josie gets very sick. One day, the sun starts coming in strongly through the windows, and Klara rushes to Josie’s room and opens her blinds to have it shine on her. Everyone comes in and watches. This is the turning point, where Josie begins to get better. It’s interesting to me how the humans kind of go along with her weird “beliefs” (Rick takes her to the barn to pray to the sun, Josie’s dad helps destroy the Cootings Machine, they let her shine the sun in Josie’s face). They don’t seem to have any religion of their own, so they are open to hers. They don’t ask her a lot of questions about it. If she says, with great optimism, that she thinks destroying the Cootings Machine will help Josie, then that’s all Josie’s dad needs to hear.